Retirement doesn’t just raise financial concerns – it can also mean feeling unmoored and irrelevant

Getty Images Stock Photo by Marianne Janack, Hamilton College Most discussions of retirement focus on the financial aspects of leaving the workforce: “How to save enough for retirement” or “How do you know if you have enough money for retirement?” But this might not be the biggest problem that potential retirees face. The deeper issues of meaning, relevance and identity that retirement can bring to the fore are more significant to some workers. Work has become central to the modern American identity, as journalist Derek Thompson bemoans in The Atlantic. And some theorists have argued that work shapes what we are. For most people, as business ethicist Al Gini argues, one’s work – which is usually also one’s job – means more than a paycheck. Work can structure our friendships, our understandings of ourselves and others, our ideas about free time, our forms of entertainment – indeed our lives. I teach a philosophy course about the self, and I find that most of my students think of the problems of identity without thinking about how a job will make them into a particular kind of person. They think mostly about the prestige and pay that come with certain jobs, or...